We had great fun today coming to school in our pyjamas. We brought books and chilled together in class during our Big Read. We spent some time illustrating a robot using our creativity. We also had Free Writing Friday time and wrote some great sentences and stories.
We have been so busy over the last few weeks and we have been really enjoying our learning. This is a summary of some of our learning highlights which we would like to share.
Topic – Ancient Egypt
We are really interested in our Topic, Ancient Egypt and we have enjoyed leading our learning. We wanted to learn more about the Pyramids of Giza and we started off by following a tutorial to create picture of the pyramids. They look great and we were so focused on our learning.
We also learned more about how and why the pyramids were built. We have been reading books and watching videos in class to support our learning. One of our favourite recent learning activities was a STEAM Challenge (Science, Technologies, Engineering, Art and Mathematics.) We had to create a 3D model of the Pyramids of Giza. This was fun because we worked in partners and we chose how to create our model. Some of us used paper, some of us used construction or other strategies.
We loved talking about our strategies and the tools we chose to use. Creativity was one of the main skills we identified as part of our Success Criteria. We also had to use great teamwork with our partner to be successful. We currently have our pyramids displayed in our classroom and we love to show them to anyone visiting our classroom.
Numeracy and Maths
We continue to engage in Number Talks every day to consolidate Numeracy skills and to talk about different Numeracy strategies. We also engage in Numeracy every day and one day a week, we focus on a Maths topic. At the moment, we are exploring fractions in Maths, and in Numeracy, we are learning division strategies. We are starting to understand the link between fractions and division. The following learning activities are examples of our learning from the last few weeks.
Using arrays to divide numbers and consolidate multiplication.
Working in random partners and in groups to solve division calculations by making equal groups. We always share our strategies and help each other. We love talking about our learning.
Literacy – Writing
We are working vey hard in Writing. Primary 2 are moving on to writing a Procedure and Primary are continuing to work on writing explanation texts. We are still splitting into two groups for Writing at the moment due to P2 and P3 focusing on different genres. Mrs Robertson will soon work with P3 pupils, and P2 pupils will work with Miss Marra.
We are excited to share more of our writing with you. Watch this space and we will share more examples of our writing.
We recently peer-assessed our writing again to give each other feedback and identify next steps. We were very focused and used the skill “communication” to talk about our ideas and listen to others in our group.
Literacy – Grammar
We are learning to identify and use past and present tense verbs in Grammar. We are consolidating our learning and applying our learning in different contexts. We recently engaged in a learning activity that we loved so much, we asked to do it again! Miss Marra gave each of us a card with verb on it. Some verbs were past tense and some were present tense. We had to find the person who had the same verb as us in a different tense e.g. walk – walked. This is how we were split into random partners. We then wrote a sentence for each verb on our cards. Mrs Mitchell worked with a group, and Miss Marra supported us with our learning. Our challenge was to make up our own sentences with past and present tense verbs which we really enjoyed, especially when we made up silly sentences.
This is Blair’s past and present tense verbs with her sentences above which she created with a partner. She confidently shared her sentences with the class and could talk about how she knew which verb was past tense and which verb was written in the present tense.
Music
We look forward to our music workshop with Dave every Wednesday. We all had the opportunity to play instruments this week which was amazing! Miss Marra forgot to take photos, so we will share some photos of us playing instruments next week. We learned to make loud and quiet sounds with our instruments to tell a story.
Last week, we used sound and learned how music can be used to tell stories. We also took part in acting out the story to help us understand it better. Some of us were even talking about the links with Guided Reading and Reading Comprehension. This role-play activity in Music helped us to understand the story. 
Article 29: We have the right to develop our talents and abilities.
Lots of fun learning in Primary 3 this week. We have continued to learn to use arrays to help us divide. We were trying harder calculations and working out the family sums that go with each array.
we are learning to write an explanation. This week’s title was ‘How to look after a dog. We planned our writing on Wednesday and then used our plan to write our full explanation on Thursday. We are getting much better at writing interesting sentences and some of us have started learning to write in paragraphs.
In Maths we have continued to learn about fractions. This week we used 8 cubes in two colours to make creatures and then had to record it on squared paper and come up with a fraction sentence about it ie My creature is half green and half pink. We also learned about how many cubes one quarter and three quarters are.
In topic we were learning about Roman houses. We found out about how the rich and poor Romans lived. We learned that very rich Romans had massive villas with lots of rooms, they even had slaves to look after them. We found out that some villas had a room called a ‘vomitarium’? Ask your children what that was used for!!!!!!
We have been celebrating all things Scottish over the last few weeks and classes have had fun learning about Scottish culture as well as reading and writing in Scots. They have enjoyed listening to Scottish poems, stories and songs.
Primary 1 have been using Scots words to describe the weather. Some classes have included Scots words in their WordBoost lists. Primary 5 created their own ‘scunners’, Scottish horror characters and also wrote examples of alliteration in Scots.
Many thanks to our wonderful Secret Readers who read some stories in Scots this week. Classes always love have a visitor and it is so important for learners to hear adults reading aloud. This is especially appreciated when we are encouraging and celebrating the diversity of languages at East Calder Primary.
We would love to hear from any parent or carer who would like to read to a class in a language other than English. Although pupils might not understand the words we would love to widen their experience of listening to other languages being spoken.
If you are interested please get in touch by emailing our school office.
Rights Article 30: I have the right to learn and use the language of my family.
We are growing in confidence in using arrays to help with our division. We looked at different arrays and were able to write the 4 family calculations that go with them. Two multiplication and 2 division. ie. 5 x 4 = 20, 4 x 5 = 20, 20 / 4 = 5 & 20 / 5 = 4.
As part of our learning to understand what we read, this week we started to work on clarifying what we read. We worked with random partners to work out what an ‘alien’ word in a sentence could be replaced with. For example if our sentence was Mark looked at the gkdoiaful flower. Some of us replaced the ‘alien’ word with wonderful or beautiful. We had to think of the whole sentence and make sure it still made sense.
It’s been a busy week back to school in P2/1. We have been using numicon to investigate number bonds and have had fun listening to the months of the year song in maths.
We are continuing to build and blend letters to read words in our reading books and have been practising Fry’s words along with our handwriting.
This week we listened to information about two planets: Jupiter and Saturn. We enjoyed watching The Space Explorers on CBeebies and could tell the class some facts we learned.
We have been learning how to write a discussion this term. We have to think about arguments for and against a topic. We have completed several this term including ‘Should we get a class pet?’ and ‘Should children be made to wear school uniform?’. We write our plan one day and then the nest we write our Discussion text. We have been trying really hard to remember our capital letters and full stops and are getting better at using our word logs for spelling.
We have started learning about verbs. We have been copying actions in a song and coming up with actions of our own. We have worked with random partners to find verbs in a passage and come up with sentences using interesting verbs.
In Literacy, we have been working hard on our Bump It Up Wall. We have changed the writing on our wall and we worked together as a class to give feedback to each other. This means the people with their writing on the wall, all know what they are doing well and their next steps.
We love Guided Reading and one of our favourite learning activities to do is independent reading for enjoyment on Epic. We also use Epic at the start of each Guided Reading lesson to practise reading fluently. We lead echo reading with the class in pairs and this really helps us to read a range of texts fluently.
We also get the chance to lead echo reading in our groups and have been working on asking and answering questions. Some of us are working on inferential questions where we have to read between the lines. Some of us are going to be learn dictionary skills to get us ready for clarifying which will will be our Comprehension focus next term.
Article 13: We have the right to fund out things and share what we think with others.
We are learning the “sh” sound this week and some of us are learning more CVC words. We have learned the “sh” sound before but we are excited to learn some new words with this sound.
We take part in Active Spelling every Monday morning to help us practise reading and writing our words. One of our favourite learning activities is “Musical Words.” We play music and dance to burn off some energy and when the music stops we find a word on our word list to write. Sometimes our words are scattered around the classroom on sticky notes. We work in random partners and choose a word to write. We also have the opportunity to write a sentence. We write on the tables with white board pens which is a fun way to write our words. We share the words we have written too. This is a fun way to be introduced to new words and we told Miss Marra that this game is one of our favourite learning activities.
Article 29: We have the right to develop our talents and abilities.
We are continuing our learning about using question marks. This week we worked with random partners to come up with questions about a picture. We wrote them on sticky notes so we could display them and remind ourselves what to do.
In Numeracy we have been learning about Fact families. A fact family is made up of three numbers and can be made up of at least four math facts. For example, if a child knows that 3 + 4 = 7 then they can also deduce that 4 + 3 = 7 and 7 – 4 = 3 and 7 – 3 = 4.
In Literacy we worked on the discussion, “Should children be allowed screen time?”. We had a great discussion about it and came up with lots of arguments for and against. Ask your child what they think about it.
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